10 of History’s Most Remarkable Hoaxes and Forgeries

Little Girls Convince Sherlock Holmes’ Author, and Much of England, That Fairies are Real

One might imagine that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the cynical and deductive reasoning Sherlock Holmes, would have been one of those hard-to-fool skeptical types. In reality, however, the author was nothing like his famous character. Late in life, Doyle became a big booster of spiritualism, and in his eagerness to credit anything that would support his beliefs, became a gullible old fool who fell hard for a hoax perpetrated by two little girls.

It began in 1917, in the English village of Cottingley. There, 9-year-old Elsie Wright and her 16-year-old cousin Frances Griffith claimed that they hung around with fairies beside a nearby stream. Their parents scoffed, so to prove it, the girls borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera, and came back half an hour later with “evidence”. When Elsie’s father developed the film, he was surprised to find a picture of fairies dancing around Frances. However, he dismissed it as a prank by his daughter, who knew her way around cameras. When the girls came up with more fairy photos in subsequent months, Elsie’s father finally forbade them to borrow his camera.

Two years later, the fairy photos started going viral after Frances’ mother showed them at a meeting of the Theosophical Society – a New Age spiritualist type group. The photos were clearly questionable, and experts who saw them pronounced them crude cardboard cutouts. However, the existence of Fairies dovetailed with some religious tenets of the Theosophical Society, so its members – who included prominent British figures – began spreading the photos and vouching for their authenticity.

In 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became aware of the photos. He was initially skeptical and went so far as to ask Eastman Kodak for their opinion. However, before receiving a reply from the camera and film manufacturer, Doyle concluded that the photos were real. Before long, Sherlock Holmes’ author was vouching for the photos’ authenticity, en route to becoming a huge advocate for the existence of fairies in real life.

In December of 1920, Doyle published a cringe-worthy article urging the public to accept that fairies existed. The article opened him to significant ridicule from a press that was equal parts puzzled, and equal parts embarrassed for the respected author. It did not dissuade Doyle, who followed the first article with a second in 1921, describing even more fairy sightings. A year later, he capped it off by publishing his 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies.

As it turned out, Sherlock Holmes’ creator should have been more skeptical. In 1983, the cousins published an article, in which they confessed that the whole thing had been a hoax. They had used illustrations from a contemporary popular children’s book, and simply drew wings on them. The girls had kicked off the prank as a means of getting back at adults who teased them for “playing with fairies”. The joke snowballed, however, and got out of hand once the Theosophical Society and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got involved. Once that happened, they could not think of a graceful way to back out, so they just kept the hoax going, before finally coming clean, six decades later.

Popes Used Forged Document to Declare Themselves Sovereign Over Western Europe

The Middle Ages’ greatest hoax, and one with a major historic impact, was the so-called “Donation of Constantine“. It was a document recording a generous gift from Roman emperor Constantine the Great, transferring authority over Rome and the entire Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I (reigned 314 – 335) and his successors. The donation of such vast territories to the Popes elevated them from mere priests and religious leaders to independent princes and sovereign rulers of territory in their own right.

In reality, the Donation was forged in the 8th century by some unknown monks, hundreds of years after both Constantine the Great and Sylvester I were dead and buried. The forgery had little impact when it was concocted, but centuries later, during a period of political upheavals that wracked Medieval Europe, the Donation would play a huge role in shaping Christendom and the West.

The forged text describes how Pope Sylvester I miraculously cured Constantine from leprosy, which convinces the emperor to convert to Christianity. The emperor goes on to demonstrate his gratitude by making the Pope supreme over all other bishops, and “over all the churches of God in the whole earth“. Vast landed estates throughout the Roman Empire are also granted, for the upkeep and maintenance of the churches of Saint Paul and Saint Peter. And to top it off, the Holy Father and his successors were granted imperial regalia, a crown, the city of Rome, and all of the Western Roman Empire.

After it was created, the forgery was stashed away and forgotten for hundreds of years, until Pope Leo IX dusted it off in the mid 11th century, and cited it as evidence to assert his authority over secular rulers. Surprisingly, the Donation was widely accepted as authentic, and almost nobody questioned the document’s legitimacy. For centuries thereafter, the Donation of Constantine carried significant weight whenever a Pope pulled it out to figuratively wave in the face of secular rulers.

It was not until the Renaissance and the spread of secular humanism that the Donation’s authenticity was finally challenged. With the revival of Classical scholarship and textual criticism, scholars took a fresh look at the document. It quickly became clear that the text could not possibly have dated to the days of Constantine the Great and Pope Sylvester I. One hint was the use of language and terms that did not exist in the 4th century, but only came into use hundreds of years later. Additionally, the document contained dating errors that a person writing at the time could not possibly have made. The Popes did not officially renounce the document, but from the mid-1400s, onwards they stopped referencing it in their Bulls and pronouncements.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

One of history’s most insidious hoaxes began in 1903, when a conservative Russian newspaper published what it claimed were the minutes of a late 19th-century secretive meeting between Jewish leaders. According to the minutes, the Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish domination, which would be brought about by Jews infiltrating and dominating the global media and economy. From such positions of influence and power, the Jews would act as agents saboteurs to weaken the Gentiles, by subverting their morals and undermining the foundations of their societies.

In reality, the minutes, which came to be known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, were crude forgeries that first made the rounds in Russian right-wing circles. A Russian Tsarist official, Serge Nilus, edited several versions of the Protocols, each time with a different account of how he came by them. In 1911, for example, he claimed that his source had stolen them from a (nonexistent) Zionist headquarters in France.

From Nilus and his conservative circles, the Protocols slowly spread, before going viral and gaining widespread acceptance throughout Russia and the world beyond. For years after their creation, the Protocols languished in relative obscurity, confined to Russian right-wing circles. That changed with the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Bolshevik seizure of power later that year. Conservatives, whose ranks were rife with anti-Semites, sought to discredit the Revolution by painting it as part of a vast Jewish conspiracy for global dominance.

Their claims resonated, and it did not take long for the forgery to go from a Russian right-wing curiosity to a global phenomenon. In Britain, The Morning Post published the Protocols, with an introduction warning its readers of the Jewish plot: ” …the Jews are carrying it out with steadfast purpose, creating wars and revolutions…to destroy the white Gentile race, that the Jews may seize the power during the resulting chaos and rule with their claimed superior intelligence over the remaining races of the world, as kings over slaves.” In the United States, Henry Ford paid for the printing and distribution of half a million copies, titled The International Jew: The World’s Problem. In Germany, the Nazis cited the Protocols for propaganda purposes during their rise to power, and made them assigned readings for schoolchildren after they came to power.

As with many claims that reinforce preexisting prejudices and buttress longstanding beliefs, truth was immaterial. In 1921, The Times of London conclusively demonstrated that the Protocols were a forgery, and the evidence was widely reprinted around the world. It made no difference in right-wing circles, where the debunking of the Protocols was dismissed as self-serving “fake news” from the Jewish-controlled media. Convinced anti-Semites remained just as convinced of the Protocols‘ authenticity.

Today, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are no longer acceptable fare in the Western mainstream. However, they continue to circulate within anti-Semitic circles, white nationalist groups, the alt-right, etc., and since the 2016 elections, their circulation has seen an uptick in the US. Outside the West, the Protocols continue to be reprinted, recycled, and quoted, with little challenge to their authenticity.

Radio Play About Martian Invasion Causes Widespread Panic, as Listeners Mistake it for Real News

In the 1930s, the Columbia Broadcasting System’s radio network hosted The Mercury Theatre on the Air – a live radio drama series created by Orson Welles, which presented classic literary works. On Sunday, October 30th, 1938, Welles directed and narrated an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds as a Halloween special. It ended up causing widespread panic when many listeners mistook the radio play about a fictional alien invasion for a news broadcast describing an actual alien invasion.

H.G. Wells’ original War of the World describes a Martian invasion of Victorian Britain, in which the aliens swiftly crush humans with advanced technology such as unstoppable death rays and lethal poison gasses. Orson Welles’ adaptation converted the novel into a series of news bulletins, describing an alien invasion of 1938 New Jersey.

Welles’ broadcast made it clear at the beginning that it was a radio play. However, many listeners tuned in mid-broadcast, and thus missed the notification that what they were hearing was a play, not actual news. For such listeners, what they heard was alarming, as Welles, playing the part of a news announcer, fired off a series of news bulletins describing the arrival of Martians in New Jersey.

Alarm turned into panic for many, when the Martians demonstrated their hostile intent by falling upon the good people of New Jersey with a ferocious and seemingly unstoppable attack. Soon, an actor who sounded like President Franklin Roosevelt was telling America: “Citizens of the nation: I shall not try to conceal the gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of your government in protecting the lives and property of its people. . . . we must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us, so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human supremacy on this earth.” That was followed by reports that the US Army was engaged, then by news bulletins announcing that New York City was being evacuated.

Although the broadcast was interrupted at intervals with notifications making it clear that it was just a play, many listeners had not lingered by their radios long enough to hear such clarifications. Soon as they heard that Earth was under attack by unstoppable alien invaders who were slaughtering all and sundry, many panicked and ran out of their homes screaming, or packed their cars and fled into the night.

All across the country, telephone operators were swamped as thousands of frightened listeners called radio stations, police, and newspapers. Some people rushed to churches to pray, others donned improvised gas masks, and others simply ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. The following morning, Orson Welles woke up to discover that he was the most talked about man in America. Once it became clear that Martians were not actually invading, public panic was replaced by public outrage at Welles for fooling them, and many accused him of causing the panic on purpose.

Porcupine Boats and Empty Forts

One of the most remarkable figures of China’s Three Kingdoms Period (184 – 280 AD) was Zhuge Liang (181 – 234), a military strategist and wily politician with a reputation for trickery and hoaxes. One of his most famous exploits occurred in 208, during the buildup to a climactic battle between rival Chinese armies separated by the Yangtze River.

As the forces gathered, Zhuge Liang’s opponents maneuvered him into publicly pledging to furnish 100,000 arrows within a few days. It was a seemingly impossible task, and because of the political dynamics at the time, failure would have meant Liang’s doom. He mulled things over, then gathered a flotilla of river boats, lined them up with bales of wet straw, and instructed their crews what he expected from them.

Liang waited for a foggy night and quietly had his boats rowed across the river with muffled oars to escape detection, and positioned them in a line close to the enemy camp. Then, at a signal, Liang’s crews broke the night’s silence with an unholy din, clanging gongs, beating drums, and shouting. The startled enemy camp awoke from its sleep in a panic. Convinced that they were under attack, the enemy soldiers loosed a hail of arrows at the boat silhouettes flitting in the murk. The arrows were embedded in the bales of straw lining Liang’s boats, until they resembled giant floating porcupines. Then, with his pincushioned boats groaning beneath the weight of over 100,000 captured arrows, Liang returned to camp, his pledge fulfilled.

Liang was also credited with devising what came to be known in Chinese folklore as the “empty fort strategy”. It came about when he was tasked with defending a walled city with a severely undermanned garrison. A huge enemy army approached – one that Zhuge’s tiny garrison had no hope of resisting. Realizing the futility of fighting, Liang resorted to hoaxing the enemy. Instead of barricading the city gates, he threw them wide open, then grabbed a musical instrument and started playing it nonchalantly atop the gates. Enemy scouts witnessed that and reported it to their commander, so he rode to the gates to see for himself. He saw a city whose gates were wide open, its walls unmanned, and visible atop the entryway, the famously tricky Liang playing music. That did not seem right, so suspecting a trap, the enemy commander turned his army around and beat a hasty retreat.

World War I Decoy Ships

As a densely populated island nation, Britain relies on shipping for its survival. During WWI, the British were hard-pressed by German U-boats, whose predation on merchant shipping threatened to disrupt vital supplies and derail Britain’s war effort. As part of a multi-pronged strategy to beat back the U-boats, the British Royal Navy resorted to decoy vessels, known as Q-ships, which carried concealed weapons. When the U-boats surfaced to attack, the seemingly unarmed Q-ships would uncover their guns and sink the U-boats.

The British typically used freighters and trawlers with concealed guns in collapsible deck structures. Acting as bait, the decoys would sail routes known to be heavily infested with U-boats, in the hopes of attracting the attention of a German submarine and enticing it to make an attack. When hailed by the U-boat, a portion of the crew, known as the “panic party”, would act like normal merchant sailors, terrified by the sudden appearance of an enemy submarine, and rush to the lifeboats to abandon ship.

The use of expensive torpedoes to sink relatively easy targets such as trawlers and freighters was considered overkill, and was officially frowned upon. So U-boat captains would normally close the distance to the now “abandoned” ship, and open fire from close range and sink it with the deck gun. However, once the U-boat drew near, hidden crewmen remaining aboard the decoy would haul down the merchant flag and raise the Royal Navy’s ensign. Simultaneously, other crewmen would collapse the deck structure, revealing up to four guns manned and ready for action, which would open fire and sink the surprised U-boat.

The decoy ships were successful when first introduced, and within months, they sank 11 German U-boats. However, as the war progressed, experience taught German submariners to be wary and to approach small vessels with caution lest they turn out to be Q-ships carrying concealed weapons. If any suspicion was aroused, torpedoes were used to sink the target ship from a safe distance.

The decoy ships’ utility finally came to an end in 1917, when the Germans declared unrestricted submarine warfare and began sinking ships on sight and without warning. The decoy’s utility had depended on U-boats hailing them, then coming close enough for the armed merchantmen to surprise them. Once the Germans abandoned that standard operating procedure, the stratagem became useless.

A Disgruntled Employee Pulled Off One of Science’s Greatest Hoaxes

One of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated upon the world of science began in 1912, when an amateur English archaeologist, Charles Dawson, announced the discovery of human-like fossils in Piltdown, East Sussex. Dawson had unearthed fossilized fragments of a cranium, jawbone, and other parts, in a Pleistocene layer. Britain’s premier paleontologist declared the fossils were evidence of an unknown proto-human species. They were judged the “missing link”, buttressing Darwin’s then-still controversial theory that man had descended from apes.

Additional excavations were made nearby in 1913 and 1914, during which stone tools were discovered. Two miles away, teeth and additional skull fragments were unearthed. So were animal remains, and a mysterious carved bone resembling a cricket bat. Excitement mounted with each new find, and the fossils were accepted uncritically by many leading British scientists.

At the time, there was a growing, and as it ultimately turned out, correct, scientific belief that human evolution from ape to man had occurred in Africa. It was there that fossils of homo erectus, an early hominid, had been discovered. That however meant that the cradle of mankind was in Africa and that all humans were of African origin. The notion that they were ultimately African was too jarring for many Europeans, including many in the British scientific community.

Piltdown Man offered a feasible alternative, and thus a convenient out, from the challenge posed to the racist theories of the day by humanity’s African origins. Moreover, if the “missing link” discovered in the English countryside was accurate, it would mean that Britain had played a prominent role in human evolution. It would also buttress the belief that Europeans – or at least the British – had evolved separately, and were not of African origins. Thus, the prevailing racist assumptions that Europeans were a distinct, and superior, branch of the human tree, could continue unchallenged. All the preceding produced confirmation bias on the part of British scientists, which led them to interpret the “evidence” in the light most favorable to their preexisting prejudices.

As it happened, the Piltdown discovery was a hoax, but because of incompetence, ethno nationalism, and racism, the discovery was embraced and defended by much of the British scientific establishment. It took four decades before Piltdown Man was finally debunked, making it one of history’s most successful scientific hoaxes. During those decades, few resources were directed at studying human evolution in Africa, where the actual missing links were ultimately discovered.

Nonetheless, and despite the poor funding for African archaeological exploration, more proto-human fossils were unearthed in Africa in the 1930s. Those finds, coupled with additional Neanderthal finds, left Piltdown Man as an odd outlier in human evolution. Still, the hoax had its powerful defenders, and it was not until 1953 that the fossils were subjected to rigorous scientific reexamination. They turned out to be fragments of a modern human skull, only 600 years old, the jaw and teeth of an orangutan, and the tooth of a chimpanzee. Chemical testing showed that the bones had been stained to make them look older, and the ape teeth had been filed down to look more human-like. As to the perpetrator, it turned out to be a disgruntled museum employee getting back at his boss, Britain’s chief paleontologist, who had denied him a pay raise.

Charlatan Uses Science-Sounding Gibberish to Hoax Millions Out of Investors

One of the 19th century’s most fascinating hoaxes was perpetrated by John Ernst Worrell Keely (1837 – 1898). Keely had tried his hand at many occupations in his youth, and by turns became a carpenter, painter, carnival barker, member of a theatrical orchestra, and a mechanic. His true calling however was as a conman. In 1872, Keely declared that he had invented a new engine that would revolutionize the world, by drawing its energy from a new physical force with unlimited power.

At the time, there was a widespread and mistaken belief that space was filled with something called a “luminiferous ether” – a hypothetical material that scientists thought was necessary for the movement of light or electric waves. Keely was no scientist, but he read about the luminiferous ether somewhere, then claimed to have figured out how to tap into and extract energy from it.

Keely declared that he had unraveled the secrets of the luminiferous ether, and could tap into the power of atoms in water. As he explained it, atoms were in a state of constant vibration, and by harnessing and channeling water’s vibrations in his revolutionary Keely engine, people could draw upon limitless energy. By getting the water’s atoms to vibrate in unison in accordance with the principles of the luminiferous ether, you could use its “etheric force” to power motors. In other words, the Keely Engine was a perpetual motion machine – an impossibility under the basic laws of physics, because it would violate the first or second laws of thermodynamics.

However, Keely demonstrated a prototype to guests in his workshop that convinced them that he was on to something. In the demonstration, Keely would pour water into the engine, then play a musical instrument to activate the machine with sound vibrations. The engine would come alive, providing pressures of up to 50,000 psi on display gauges. By harnessing that power, Keely demonstrated that iron bars could be bent, twisted, and snapped in two; thick ropes could be torn apart, and bullets could be driven through twelve inches of wood.

Keely made up scientific-sounding terms to describe the principles of his invention. He termed his engine a “vibratory generator”, and told observers that they were witnessing “quadruple negative harmonics”. Gullible investors were told that they would grow filthy rich off Keely’s “hydro-pneumatic pulsating vacu-engine”. If a listener sounded skeptical, Keely would swamp him in a flood of science-y sounding phrases such as “vibratory negatives”, “atomic triplets”, “etheric disintegration”, and “atomic ether vibrations”.

The terms were pseudo-scientific gibberish, but they were effective. Within a short time, Keely convinced investors to hand over the equivalent of $20 million in 2017 dollars as startup capital, which he used to found the Keely Motor Company. In subsequent years, investors coughed up the equivalent of an additional 100 million dollars in today’s money for a stake in Keely’s company.

Keely closely guarded the secret of his invention, and for more than two decades, he refused to share its details with anybody. But he strung his investors along, by promising them that the perfection of a commercial version of his engine was right around the corner. During that time, gullible investors kept throwing money at him, despite the consensus of physicists that Keely was a charlatan, and that perpetual motion such as he promised was physically impossible. It was only after Keely died in 1898 that the secret of his engine was revealed. It had not been powered by water vibrations, but by a compressed air machine hidden two floors below, and connected to the Keely engine by concealed pipes and hoses.

Quack Revives 19th Century Hoax, and Makes it Official Scientific Dogma of the USSR

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a 19th-century French biologist, theorized that physiological changes acquired by an organism during its lifetime could be passed on to its progeny. Thus, according to what came to be known as Lamarckian Inheritance, if you hit the gym and worked out hard to develop six-pack abs, you could pass six-pack abs on to your kids.

Lamarck was wrong: heritable traits are passed through genes, hardcoded with their own instructions, and subject to the occasional mutation. An organism’s genes neither know nor care what traits and characteristics the organism acquired during its lifetime. Your genes might pass on to your descendants a predisposition for six-pack abs, but only if they were already coded for such a predisposition. However, no matter how many sit-ups and ab crunches you do, it will have zero impact on whether your kids will have an easy time developing six-pack abs. By the late 19th century, only a few quacks still believed in Lamarckian Inheritance.

In the 1930s, however, Lamarckian Inheritance experienced an odd revival in the Soviet Union. That was when a quack named Trofim Lysenko modified Lamarckian Inheritance into a theory that came to be known as Lysenkoism. Lysenko claimed to have discovered that, among other things, rye could be transformed into wheat, wheat could be transformed into barley, and that weeds could be transformed into grain crops.

It was as scientific as a Medieval alchemist claiming the ability to transform lead into gold, and just as laughably ludicrous. However, in a sinister twist, Lysenko found a powerful supporter for his theories: Joseph Stalin. In the scary political environment of Stalin’s USSR, criticizing Lamarckian theories was equated with criticizing Stalin. You did not criticize Stalin, or even hint that you might disagree with Stalin if you knew what was good for you.

Challenging Lamarckian Inheritance was treated as political subversion and deviancy. The logic was chilling and lethal: Comrade Stalin endorses Lamarckism. You disagree with Lamarckism. Therefore you disagree with Comrade Stalin. That makes you a subversive, a Trotskyite, a foreign spy, fascist agent, or capitalist stooge working to sabotage the Soviet Union.

Soviet scientists who challenged Lysenko and his revived Lamarckism were arrested by the NKVD, brutally interrogated, tortured, sent to the gulag where many died, or simply executed. Lysenko instigated a campaign to eliminate his opponents, in which more than 3000 mainstream biologists were fired, jailed, arrested, or executed. Before Lysenko, Russia and the Soviet Union had been world leaders in the field of genetics. However, genetic research disproved Lamarckian Inheritance, so genetic research was wholly abandoned. It would not be revived until after Stalin’s death in 1953, by which point the Soviets had fallen decades behind.

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Sources & Further Reading

Anti Defamation League – A Hoax of Hate: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

Encyclopedia Britannica – Donation of Constantine

History Collection – The First ‘Confidence Man’ And Other Historic Cheats

Guardian, The – ­Keeley’s Trickster Engine

Museum of Hoaxes – The Cottingley Fairies

History Collection – Creative Pranks and Hoaxes in History

Natural History Museum – Piltdown Man

New Yorker, The – Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax

History Collection – Best April Fools’ Day Pranks and Hoaxes of All Time

Shen Yun Performing Arts – Three Kingdoms: Zhuge Liang Captures Arrows With Boats of Straw

Smithsonian Magazine – The Infamous “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke

Wikipedia – Piltdown Man

Wikipedia – Trofim Lysenko